gameslol

Today I was reading a post on Presentation Zen about kinetic typography (or simply put, moving text). There’s some wonderful examples there from movie credit sequences, ads and music videos. I had seen some of them before, but a couple of others were new to me. The Starbucks ad is amazing, as is the music video of “Yo No Se Que Hacer Conmigo” (whatever that is?). Check it out.

It made me think about the use of kinetic typography in game credit sequences. There’s a few examples I can think of off the top of my head.

It should be obvious just from watching the Sam & Max credit sequences that they were heavily inspired by the movie credit sequences of Saul Bass (North by Northwest, Vertigo, etc.). I actually know this for a fact, since Jake Rodkin made them and told me that was pretty much the concept. Here’s the first intro sequence from Season 1.

I think these credit sequences are great. They really made Sam & Max look a lot more stylish and epic. Season 2 took it up a notch by adding a freezeframe transition to a title screen, having a crazy shooting gallery sequence, and including more animated text:

I suppose there has also been a minor trend recently of putting game credits as sprites inside the 3D world. Grand Theft Auto IV probably wasn’t the first to do it, but I guess it’s the first game in which I really noticed it. I remember thinking to myself how cool it looked when I first saw it. It’s a pretty simple idea, but executed really well.

Mirror’s Edge also did it briefly in the intro. Not as well, I think, but still very nice.

I usually don’t enjoy playing racing games that much, so I’m almost embarrassed to say that the best part of Colin McRae’s DIRT to me is actually the menu screens. The interface is just so slick and cool. If you watch the video till about halfway, there’s an arrow flying through space while passing various animated statistics.

One of the guys who made this interface was actually on my team at NCsoft. Imagine my excitement when I heard we’d hired “the DIRT interface guy”. Now he’s known to me as Peter Santha and he turned out not only to be very talented, but also the lucky owner of an awesome Dracula-esque accent. I hope he’ll do a credit sequence for a game someday.

Anyway, probably the best and most recent example of kinetic typography in games that I know is Little Big Planet. It’s such a rare thing not to want to skip the credit sequence. It’s a beautiful introduction to the game world and a fun way to show the team that created it. Truly a little work of art!

None of these get anywhere near the extreme typographical onslaught found on that page I linked to at the start of this post, but they do sort of fit in the same category. It would be fun to see a game take the full-on text-only approach.

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